Laurie Rhodes's blog

PowerShell’s Desired State Configuration allows for routines or classes to be run on remote machines by passing a text based “properties” object to the destination end-node. There are a growing number of Microsoft supplied “classes” and importantly, the framework allows for custom development of additional objects.

In a previous example, I gave an example of running a simple Service Management Automation runbook using REST. This blog demonstrates how to retrieve output from a called runbook by using platform independent REST calls against the SMA Server.

Jason Ginchereau is responsible for the creation of the Windows Deployment Toolkit which is incorporated into WIX. The toolkit provides extensions for PowerShell to access Windows Installer databases with managed code. Current releases can be downloaded from: http://wixtoolset.org/releases/

System Center Configuration Manager collects a surprising amount of data from both Linux and Windows based client machines. Normally the collected data may be viewed through the SCCM utility Resource Explorer but the data exists within the SCCM database and may be queried against with SQL Reporting by directly. To create custom SQL reports, knowledge of which table holds related data is a requirement.

I’ve written a fair bit about automating SCCM application creation by script. Most of this has originated from the need to use Enhanced Detection Methods for determining when Applications are installed as I know from many years of Application Packaging that unless an official “package” produces a standard file or registry based flag when it’s installed, it becomes impossible to tightly manage a software environment.

It's now been a decade since I've supported Zenworks in a commercial environment... it really was a gret product. There was no PowerShell and every engineer used a bag full of DOS type utilities to overcome limitations with supporting machines.

It was a real surprise to hear of a colleague needing to convert Zenworks SnapApps for a modern rollout. Installshield (if you have a license) can / could convert Netware AXT files but the quality of the MSI produced was poor. It was far cleaner to create a standalone installer that could be recaptured independently on a clean system.